Life in touring road cases

Every year, there's a new video that documents the production of the Eurovision Song Contest. The scope and size of the lighting rig is spectacular, and it's not the usual grid of flash-and-trash stuff that you see on the average tour. It's really inspiring, if a little unrealistic since they clearly have a budget that is beyond typical. Also crazy what you can control with Grand MA3. There's no difference between what they're using and what I have, aside from the number of things that you can control.

Anyway, the video always has a ton of road cases, which are generally made custom, but they all use the same parts. Aluminum rails, reinforced corners with the "bubble" on them, the twist clasps and such. They haven't really changed in decades, even though a lot of the gear that you put inside of them has. I have one for my console. It has wheels and a handle like a suitcase, and the console just sits in the bottom and you take the upper part off.

The first cases I ever touched were stacked with TV gear in my city's cable TV office, where I worked. After college, when I assumed a similar job in the neighboring city, I did something similar because I didn't have permanent studio space, so making as much of it portable as possible was necessary. I had four cases... two racks, one for cameras and a big one for tripods and cabling. They were obnoxiously large, but only when loading them in and out of the van.

There's something incredibly satisfying about moving around a bunch of stuff, setting it all up, doing the show, then tearing it all down and doing it again somewhere else. In that cable job, we did it about 40 times a year. The routine stuff was public meetings, but then we also did things like basketball games, orchestra concerts, high school graduation, and once we even did a live call-in show, turning my office and neighboring office into a makeshift studio. We used a lot of gaffer's tape.

The most satisfying part was at the end of the night, when you had it all packed up again and you had a tape in your hand. The room looks like you were never there. I can only imagine what that's like for a touring show.